Suchergebnisse

Many cities in developing countries are confronted with many problems regarding their physical structures. The efforts to overcome these difficulties arose from the political, economic and cultural structural factors that preside over those countries. Iranian cities also follow this pattern of development. However, many of these cities lack the necessary research and scientific knowledge to determine a suitable path for development and planning. Furthermore, policymaking does not rest on a basis of suitable fundamentals and information. Many plans in these cities have therefore led to unsuitable results and, rather than moving existing aims forward, have created new difficulties. Mashad, as the second-largest metropolis of Iran after Tehran and the third-most important religious city of the Islamic world, has a great development potential that should be correctly and properly applied. Essential to this goal is the availability of necessary information about the history and regional and local characteristics of the city and, on the other hand, having enough knowledge about other developing countries' experiences. Using this information and these analyses and tested theories, one can work towards a suitable development program for this unique city. Under this assumption, this dissertation has two main aims. First, the gathering of documentary evidence and categorization of historic information about Mashad, especially in the physical field, and second, the production of a pattern for evaluating the degree of influence of factors that affect the physical evolution of cities and their comparison with each other. This would be effective in discovering the reciprocal relationship of these factors and could pave the way for applying urban experiments in similar future analyses. With these aims, Mashad is used as the case study and Iranian and European cities as the general comparative grounds for this study. Initial results show that effective factors on the physical evolution in Mashad have not only had very different conditions from European cities but also with other cities in Iran. For example, the main influence of political factors on the development of Mashad in all of historic periods and the gradual growth of this effect in Iranian cities versus the decreasing in this effect on the physical development of European cities is significant. At the same time, while social factors (with an emphasis on public participation) have continually grown in their effect on European cities, these show a significant decrease in Iranian cities and especially Mashad over the course of history. This phenomenon can be seen in the lack of urban public spaces for social interactions within the core of the city. These different features fundamentally emphasize a need for new development planning specifically for this city. The presented pattern for estimating the state of a city or cities in various historic and chronological periods and the comparative tables in this pattern prepare the grounds for analysis and produce several results, which are shown in detail in the dissertation. Without exaggerating, the lack of information about Mashad and the need for completing this work before producing schedules, diagrams and analytic and comparative tables have made this dissertation the equivalent of two theses in the frame of one research project; I hope this will be considered.

A discussion of the connection between physical evolution & cultural progress, indicating that& 'the acquisition of certain morpho-physiological characteristics of body structure & functioning in the hominids.... was an essential prerequisite for the appearance of the earliest industries & their later improvement & specialization. ' Only after the emergence of Homo sapiens did cultural progress become independent of changes in human nature. D. Cooperman.

Everywhere the issue has been examined, people make discriminations about others' physical attractiveness. Can human standards of physical attractiveness be understood through the lens of evolutionary biology? In the past decade, this question has guided much theoretical and empirical work. In this paper, we (a) outline the basic adaptationist approach that has guided the bulk of this work, (b) describe evolutionary models of signaling that have been applied to understand human physical attractiveness, and (c) discuss and evaluate specific lines of empirical research attempting to address the selective history of human standards of physical attractiveness. We also discuss ways evolutionary scientists have attempted to understand variability in standards of attractiveness across cultures as well as the ways current literature speaks to body modification in modern Western cultures. Though much work has been done, many fundamental questions remain unanswered.

An analysis of the nature of feedback mechanisms which operate between physical & cultural evolution. It is indicated that the rate of cultural evolution in modern human pop's is substantially controlled by non-genetic factors, ie, by soc enviromental & geographic opportunities. In the same vein, diff's in technological levels are explicable re diff'ial opportunity rather than by diff'ial intelligence. In various historical phases, a species depends on diff types of feedbacks as sources of energy for eveolutionary change, M. Farber.